bubosquared | (no subject)

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I'm halfway planning to refomat my HD and install Linux/Unix/whatever, basically, an open source OS. Could anyone please tell me if this is a good idea for me? Ta.

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Ummmm. I have Unix. I can tell you that it's pretty useless unless you plan on sharing large amounts of data on a network or sharing programs on a network.

First off, if you're going to do this, I am going to tell you right now: BACK EVERYTHING THE FUCK UP. Sorry for the caps, but I only partially did, and the Windows partition on the hard drive I shared the Linux partition with crashed. Bye bye data.

Secondly, you might want to check the compatibility of your sound and graphics cards and modem with Linux. Some don't.

Thirdly, some flavors of Linux are going to be harder to install than others. Mandrake is more user-friendly than say, Slackware. And if shit goes wrong, you have to be prepared to do stuff at the command prompt rather than the happy little Windows-like graphic interface. But otherwise, I'd say go for it. Or back up Windows and see how they coexist.

There's not really that much on my HD that I can't re-dl or something, or at least zip up and put on the web for backup. Most of it are pictures of pop- and rockstars, anyway. And mp3s. And stuff.

And I'm likely to have to reformat the HD anyway, so the decision is really more "Do I install an Open Source OS, or reinstall Windows?" than anything else. I could make partitions and do both, yeah.

or, y'know, don't use linux. Almost everyone I know prefers FreeBSD, having used both of them. (I leave the geeking over these things to my SO, because he enjoys it so much, so I've never used linux, just FreeBSD.)

I should point out that I'm biased here, because I know half of the FreeBSD core team, a fair number of the active committers, and my SO is the guy who makes sound work. So. :)

and there is a rat about to leap onto the keyboard, so I'm going to go before he does.

-Kris
(bill! No! Leave my keyboard alone!)

Right, FreeBSD! That the other one I was looking for, but my brain kep insisting it was OpenBDSM. (Ahem.)

So is this suitable for a wannabe-geek? I mean, I basically only know Pascal and Q-Basic, as programming languages, and all my computer knowledge is intuitive, so.

Most people seem to feel that FreeBSD is less frustrating to manage than any of the Linux varients, because of the restriction on adding to the FreeBSD package- unlike Linux, everything that gets added to FreeBSD (stuff that's approved, if you will, drivers and so on) is normally fairly heavily tested. That said, it *does* depend on which version of FreeBSD you're using (i.e. if you're using the most recent release, or something older, as some problems have been fixed, but not retroactively corrected) and also if you're running -current or -stable. (As the names imply, -current is sort of the development arm- new things go there, and so at any given time -current may or may not be that stable- at the moment I think the most up to date -current is broken, but it should be fixed soon- the other developers don't like ti when someone breaks the development OS. :) -stable is, well, I suppose mostly aimed at the enduser, rather than developers, and while it occasionally turns up problems, it's not normally anything major, and they are generally fixed fairly quickly, unless it's a case of someone using older hardware that the active developers have decided aren't worth the time, or don't have the hardware for.[1]) So I'd go with a fairly up to date -stable, probably. (Which can be found, handily, at www.freebsd.org :)

As far as installing- it's not as user-friendly to install and maintain as something like windows, with all the pretty graphics and whatnot, and it's got a lot more options to the install process, depending on what you want to do with your machine. Also, the currently used install program, sysinstall, is, imo, Fucking Ugly. (Everyone agrees on this point, and a new system is in development. :) There is a tutorial for it, which I understand is quite good. (Never used it, although I have installed freeBSD- I just hit up my SO with questions, since he was handily 6 feet away. :) I have a friend whose programming knowledge extends to minimal C, and he managed reasonably well.

I suppose the short version of all that is- everyone I know who has used both finds freeBSD less troublesome to install and run than linux, but either way because of the nature of the beast (unix-varient rather than pre-packaged pretty OS like Windows) (which crashes 33 times a day, evil bastard. *kicks win2k computer*) there is a bit of a learning curve. :)

If you decide to install freeBSD and have trouble, if you give me specific questions I can most likely extract answers from folk. (Sometimes from the person who actually wrote the code that's causing the problems, which is always fun. :) And if you have any sound hardware issues, I can kick neph about them. :)

Also, if you'd like any freeBSD marketing paraphenalia, I have a box full. :P :) (This includes- felt demon horns on alice band type things with LEDs in so they blink- although not all of them have functional LEDS, a selection of 4 posters from the now-defunct BSDi Europe branch, sheets of "powered by freebsd" stickers, and also I believe a few postcards (mostly the same images as the posters) and some bumper stickers (which read "powered by freebsd".) :)

Um. I would think that if you're willing to spend some time educating yourself about the thing, freeBSD is the way to go. Our home file-server and router (we have a LAN consisting of on the order of 11 computers in our house- geeks much?) both run freeBSD and are incredibly stable. All of our fileserver's down-time problems have been caused by hardware failure, rather than the OS.

Um. Okay. Enough freeBSD evangelising. :)

-Kris
(who should be in bed.)

Also wanted to point out- I don't know about the GUIs availible to run on unix-based OS. It's been ages since I used any of them, and we don't run any here regularly. (All of the properly desktop machines with monitors run windows varients- mostly so I can play games and things easily, and in my SO's case because the accessibility features, onscreen keyboard and so on, are much better in windows. Everything important- file server, router, etc. run freebsd.) I do know that you can run windows on top of freebsd, if you want to use windows programs, and then if windows crashes, it only takes the work from within windows with it- the rest of the machine should stay up and running happily.

and the footnote:

[1]- I feel it only fair to point out that in some cases the friendly advice might well be "get something else." The guys (very few girls- they keep trying to get me to do useful things for them just 'cause I'm female) tend to concentrate on newer stuff because it's more in demand, and also generally more obtainable. If they happen to have a piece of hardware to hand, or someone donates it, generally a driver gets written eventually, but it's a case of when they get around to it. (I don't even want to count the number of soundcards we have at this point- well over 30. Boxes of the things.) Also, occasionally drivers don't get written (particularly with newer hardware) if the manufacturer of the chipsets on the card won't cough up the specifications. I know the guy who does most of the ethernet drivers flat out refuses to work on anything he doesn't have specs for, because he feels it's a waste of his time when there's so much else to do, and Neph (my SO) tends to put off things he doesn't have specs for, or offloads them to one of his sound-minions.

Oh. Just asked what some committer-folk thought, and they reckon you shoudl be ok, but one of them recommends you learn C, because C and Unix are very intertwined and knowing C helps to understand unix. (It also means they can tell you to fix things yourself, but he didn't say that, it's my own personal observation. They like telling people to fix things themselves and then submit a PR.) (PR being Problem Report.)

If you decide on freeBSD, I could probably post you a copy of one of the books on using freeBSD. (I forget which one. Neph's dad borrowed it, but I don't think he's using it at all, so I could get it back, but I don't have it around to check atm. :)

-Kris

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stupid lj wouldn't let me put it all in one comment.